The ambiguity of this couplet within “Pale Fire” encourages a variety of interpretive possibilities: Shade could mean that he is using his own life as commentary within the poem, which at that moment it is unfinished, or it might prophetically predict that the poem will be unfinished, or the couplet might be a frame break that slyly refers to Kinbote using his own life as a commentary on the possibly unfinished poem. Since neither Shade nor Kinbote provide an analysis of this couplet, it seems that it is left to the reader to decide what it means for themselves. This striking example of ambiguity, in addition to other seemingly impossible coincidences in the text, has led critics to speculate that Shade might have evoked Kinbote, or vice versa. Whichever interpretation is favored, attempts to interpret Pale Fire by identifying the most authoritative narrative voice are hampered by cases in which interpretive possibilities abound. It is for this reason that diagrams cannot adequately represent the narrative frames in Pale Fire, although I have attempted to represent some possible structures, which are included in the Appendix. The numerous positions held by critics, along with the intense debates on the NABOKV-L Internet forum, only attest to the seemingly chaotic structure of narrative framings within Pale Fire. The examples above illustrate the way in which Pale Fire's interplay of narrative frames confounds the search for authority within the text by foregrounding the temporariness of fictional and metanarrative devices within the chaotic arrangement of the text's frames. Therefore, LL Lee claims that the “true” level of Pale Fire is difficult to find. . . . [the] point is that each level is just as true as the next. The......middle of paper......Person and the feminine Third, so that something takes shape, develops or deteriorates depending on the phases of human events. (Calvin, Traveler 141). Since the text's second-person narration game structure has already been parodied in metanarrative mode, this passage's commentary on second-person address is an explicit second-order commentary in meta-metanarrative mode. The subtle reference to the "hypocritical self" as the "brother and double" of the "male you in general" lends a heavy note of irony to this passage, as it distances itself from the text's earlier use of second-person narration to refer to the Male reader. The second-order commentary of this passage implies that the male Reader – the “general male you” – is nothing more than another aspect of the secret “I”, the omniscient but personally involved narrator (or implied author) of the novel (Calvino , The Traveler 141).